“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
–Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

It is somewhat of a consensus around the Walrus office, or at least whichever part of that office Paul Isaacs and I happen to be in at a given time, that Sherlock Holmes is tops. This is one of those hyperbolic statements that sounds playful and ridiculous, but which is not. I believe some call this Birony.

The truth is that Sherlock Holmes is just about the best company a person could have. (He’s also a great instructor in the art of reasoning; were we all to study at his feet, the world would be a better, and slightly cooler, place.) But Holmes has had the misfortune of what we might call the public domain treatment. This phenomenon happens when a book is no one’s property and thus anyone can release it in basically any form at any time. This leads to two things: 1) a wider, often less-expensive dissemination of the texts, which in the case of Holmes is excellent, for people tend to enjoy the stories, but which in the case of Hard Times is certainly pernicious and potentially disastrous to the book’s public conception (average twenty-first century reader: not so much with the activist Dickens); and 2) a proliferation of ugly design (see: everything by Dover Thrift Editions) which is often so prevalent as to render the book forever hideous in the reading public’s mind. (I should note that it’s great that Dover makes very affordable books, and I don’t criticize their enterprise there. I’m not even asking them to make the books beautiful. Just less ugly.) (more…)

This past November, when he won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson couldn’t make it to the ceremony because he was in Iraq reporting a piece for Portfolio. At the time it seemed like strange news. But one can only imagine that, after spending years chained to a monstrous novel, the man felt like a vacation.

As Gregory Cowles recounted the other day on Paper Cuts, the New York Times books blog, Johnson made his absence up to New York with a recent reading and Q&A at the New School. I have to assume that anyone who’s ever read an interview with Johnson would show up mostly for the reading, as he’s notoriously taciturn during question periods. (A favourite of mine from the a National Book Award-sponsored interview last fall: Bret Anthony Johnston: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on? Denis Johnson: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.) (more…)

Exclusive Edward Burtynsky photos

(Backstage at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, photograph by Edward Burtynsky.)

In the sixth grade, I played Lysander in the Iles Elementary School’s presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was as professional a production as you’d imagine it to be. The fairies danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”; Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and I wore pyjamas (it was nighttime, you see, and we were very sleepy); and Christie Walden’s memorable Titania looked like a twelve-year-old cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Diana Ross on the cover of Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

I wasn’t cut out to be an actor, and it was my second and final appearance on stage. (The year before, I’d played a senile mountie in a show about an old folks’ home. My job was to intermittently wander across the stage singing, “I love the North.” Video survives.) In fact, I’ve grown to vaguely dislike the theatre. I prefer my artifice in the form of anapests and enjambments, and I do not like being seated in a crowded room. In high school, I tried to avoid the theatre kids, and was largely successful. I went to one play in university, and only because a friend was playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, a role that I knew (from reading, not seeing) that I liked. While she was good, I enjoyed the version in my head better. (more…)

It’s sort of a shame that Torsten Krol is best known for the question of whether or not he’s real. He lives in Australia, and, as the first page of Callisto reminds you, nothing else is known about him. This, of course, has led to speculation about his identity, with rumours swirling that he may actually be some other, more famous writer using a pseudonym. All of which is pretty un-germane, actually, and distracts from the reception of his new book, which is worth reading for reasons entirely unrelated to the identity of its author. So good thing we got that mystery out of the way, no?

Callisto is the story of Odell Deefus, a lumbering hunk of corn-fed Wyoming, a man with limited mental capacities and who is so convinced Condoleezza Rice’s merits as the woman of his dreams that he carries a picture of her in his pocket. It’s also the story of US paranoia, a cartoonish, kitchen-sink satire that embroils its hero in unending manifestations of an American anxiety about terrorism in particular and Islamic fundamentalism in general. Since one of the book’s pleasures is in discovering its curveball plot points and increasingly preposterous developments, I don’t want to ruin it by getting into a detailed plot summary here. (I’d avoid reading reviews, which will doubtless be forthcoming in Canada, for this reason; more than most books, their summaries will ruin this one.)

The novel succeeds on the basis of Odell’s narration, which is charmingly simple and entirely engrossing. It only fails, in fact, when it tries to be too simple by introducing malapropisms that are jarring given the subtlety with which his mental limitations are explored elsewhere. Imagine the Forrest Gump of Winston Groom’s novel wandering not through a greatest historical hits of the second half of the twentieth century but a small Kansas town where he mows lawns, drinks a lot of Captain Morgan, and notes to everyone who will listen that he has read The Yearling sixteen times. (As someone who is interested in both alcohol and the assigning of definite articles to nouns that don’t require them, Odell’s predilection for “the Captain” really resonated with me.)

By offering Odell as a sort of conduit between us and society’s reactions to the idea of terrorism, Krol succeeds in making us think not only about that society, but about how we think about it. And since Odell intends to enlist in the Army and remains a relatively unquestioning believer in his country’s trajectory, we end up thinking not just about how we think about that society, but about how we think about those who support that society’s more militaristic endeavors. In other words, Odell’s mental limitations mean that we can’t automatically rely on the narrator’s understanding of his world as we might in another novel, and what results is a sort of meta contemplation of the paranoid state and those who support it. It would be too simplistic to say that Krol indicts this mindset by aligning it with a narrator who is borderline retarded. Lots of the smarter people in this book believe in the ultimate benevolence of the police state Callisto’s America has become, too. But in giving us Odell Deefus, Krol complicates things with simplicity, and in an age where black and white can easily become too sharpened, a little complexity is not a bad thing.

In our April issue we published a poem called “Two Cowboys” by Elise Partridge, a poet from Vancouver. I was the first person at the magazine to read the poem, and I immediately fell in love with its clarity, subtle complexity, and power. Last month, “Two Cowboys” reappeared as one of the poems in Partridge’s excellent new collection, Chameleon Hours, published by the House of Anansi.

On the occasion of her new book, I asked Elise a few questions about her work and new poems.

What attracts you to the lyric mode?

I think it’s the mode that best suits my gifts and inclinations; in any case, it was the one I was most drawn to attempt, and pursue. That said, in the future I’d like to incorporate more dramatic elements into some of my poems, for example perhaps try to write monologues for different voices. I also regularly get inspiration from short stories and would like to write more poems that include narration, however compressed. (more…)

This week finds me in the middle of both a production cycle and a terrible cold, so I do not have the time or capacity to write the essay I’d intended to write about Samantha Power’s excellent new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. I had planned, you see, to point out how it’s a very good guide to understanding some of the thought behind Barack Obama’s remarkable foreign-policy philosophy, of which Power was an influential architect, and I was going to discuss Spencer Ackerman’s fine piece on that philosophy. I was going to note how unfortunate it is that the book’s release has been overshadowed by the fallout from Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster, which isn’t to say that it’s okay to call people monsters, but that one should at least wait until one’s book tour is over before doing it. If, that is, you want to talk about your book on that tour rather than your public political statements. (more…)

Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, has an air of summation about it, drawing on years of research to make an argument that is both profoundly radical and embarrassingly simple. In Pollan’s estimation, many of the epidemics facing our corner of Western society have little to do with, say, the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat in our diet. Instead, the problem is the nature of our diet as a whole, and the fact that we eat way too much of it: too much red meat, too many refined carbohydrates and sugars (usually including an array of chemical enhancements) and too little of everything else.

Partly to blame for this is the rise of nutritionism, a particular branch of food science that has spent decades casting about in an attempt to blame some evil or other for the reality that many of us are overweight. Pollan’s book is as much a defense of food as it is an indictment of the mindset that has seen us reduce food from being nutritious to being comprised of particular nutrients. This tendency, Pollan argues, lies behind our societal fetishization of the latest black-balled ingredient, a focus that allows us to ignore actual nutrition, which would just tell us to eat more vegetables and fruit, and less food overall.

In Defense of Food is a small book in size, but its scope is massive: a comprehensive study of the ways in which, over the last fifty years or so, scientists and journalists have manipulated what and how we eat. Pollan also looks forward in its call to common sense. “Eat food,” Pollan advises. “Not too much. Mostly plants.” Simple advice, and geared less to a diet fad than a new lifestyle. The book’s overwhelming success indicates its message is being well received. And let’s hope so, for as Pollan suggested in our interview, as more and more of us “vote with our forks,” casting the ballot will become easier, and more delicious.

I spoke with Michael Pollan last week, by phone from his office in Berkeley, California. (more…)

On Tuesday the New York Times ran a story announcing that young adult novelist R.L. Stine would be resuming his vaguely legendary series, Goosebumps, after an eight-year hiatus. Somewhere near you, a twelve-year-old rejoiced. (An eighteen-year-old did too, I’d wager, as they’ll be the ones with acute nostalgia once they see the new books on the shelves.)

The Times story is charming, the sort of piece about a gently strange man that, when stripped to soundbites, sounds profoundly bizarre: “Along the wall of Mr. Stine’s home office are testaments to the brand’s glory: a ‘Goosebumps’ chocolate Advent calendar”; “Under the name Jovial Bob Stine, he was the author of dozens of joke books in the 1970s and ’80s”; “‘They’re so shiny,’ he said. ‘They’ve got to be shiny now’”; and, best of all, “‘I was having a good time killing off teenagers,’ Mr. Stine said.” (more…)

It comes as no surprise that the Guardian has done something excellent, and while it’s entirely possible that most everyone is already aware of what’s going on over there, it is so fantastic that it’s worth pointing out just in case. That link will take you to the new(ish) Guardian series “Great poets of the 20th century,” where the paper has not only chosen its top seven poets of the previous hundred years, but commissioned insightful introductions by major writers and offered an array of the poets’ work. For free. On the internet.

True, it’s the online extension of a series of small books they’re publishing, presumably to celebrate the brilliance of their decision to do a series on great poets in a newspaper. But it’s nevertheless a wonderful collection, and you should get directly to it if you find yourself in need of some Hughes, Plath, Eliot, Sassoon, Heaney, Auden, or, best of all (for me at least), Larkin.

Around the time everyone realized that Philip Larkin the man was a misogynistic bigot, people stopped liking Philip Larkin the poet. Despite the obvious problems of judging an artist’s work by his or her personal unpleasantness, this hating-on-Larkin policy has, in my own anecdotal experience, taken firm root, even among people who otherwise would be predisposed to Larkin’s particular brand of quasi-formalist lyric poetry.

This sort of dismissal comes in waves, and will likely fade with time. But the best corrective is exposure to the poetry itself, which is frequently perfect and almost always moving. (more…)

I tip my hat to one of our web wizards for sending me news that Marvel comics plans to make a graphic novel out of Stephen King’s The Stand. Now this comes as a report on something King said last week on NPR, so one can’t be entirely sure that it’s true (Marvel has not yet commented). But as far as things people said on NPR last week go, this statement—“Marvel is going to do The Stand as a graphic novel”—seems pretty unequivocal.

The Stand is, by pretty much any standard, a major book. Sure, it has its issues, in particular a final third where King strives so hard to make everything seem important that the finer dramas and insights that he has spun out thus far become ridiculous. But on the whole, and in particular in the terrifying detail and nuance of its post-apocalyptic vision (as well as the fabulous depth of some of his characters, especially the more preposterous of them), it’s hard to deny that it’s anything short of kickass. (Reviewing King’s latest, Duma Key, in the Los Angeles Times in January, Richard Rayner noted that “no other popular novelist, perhaps no other contemporary novelist period, can take recognizable, ordinary people and put them through the wringer with such cackling panache while always keeping sight of their humanity. King’s characters are always fixed in the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day, wearing silly sneakers or scarfing down luncheon meat out of the fridge, and that’s a huge part of his gift and success.” I think that’s exactly right and would like to associate myself with the argument.) (more…)

PITTSBURGH, PA—We were in an old blue Volvo station wagon, the kind with Lightning Hopkins on the AM radio and black leather interior that’s worn out at the seats. Rain was driving Pittsburgh even deeper into the rusty ground. I was in the backseat, watching the city through the rhythm of the windshield wipers, and as we careened around the preposterous angles of Polish Hill, I couldn’t help but expect to see Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat around the corner of our next forty-degree turn.

The Hat, as regulars call it, is a ramshackle old juke joint on the Hill, the site of one of my favourite scenes in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and precisely the sort of place a man visiting Pittsburgh would like to spend his Thursday night. But the sad fact is that the Hat doesn’t actually exist, though it might as well, for like most of the fabricated details of Chabon’s Pittsburgh it exists in countless variations across the hills and valleys of this city. (If you’ve got the time and inclination, I think you’ll find Gooski’s a more than adequate stand-in; they’ve got Roy Orbison on the jukebox, and it’s the sort of establishment where a man can accomplish a round of three pints and three Jagermeister shots for less than twenty bucks.) (more…)

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a story announcing that Richard Ford, long-hanging ornament of the house of Knopf, was jumping ship to Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. As far as these things go, this was pretty big news. Ford, after all, had been with Knopf for seventeen years, and with his editor there, Gary Fisketjon, for years before that. During his time there, he had published four books, including Independence Day, the first novel to win the PEN award and the Pulitzer in the same year.

Ecco, by contrast, hasn’t exactly been an imprint famous for its big literary names. While they did recently put out a very beautiful series of Tobias Wolff reissues, and have a small but respectable poetry wing, they’ve also published Mario Batali’s Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style, Aromas of Aleppo: The Legendary Cuisine of Syrian Jews by the fabulously Dickensian Poopa Dweck, and John Leguizamo’s woefully forgotten autobiography Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends. (more…)